A Machine Type Communication (MTC) device is a user equipment (UE) that is used by a machine for specific application. In 3rd Generation Partnership Project Long Term Evolution (3GPP-LTE) Release 12 (Rel-12), a work item (WI) on Low Complexity MTC (LC-MTC) UEs was concluded in which the complexity and cost of MTC UEs were reduced by approximately 50%. In Release 13 (Rel-13), another WI was agreed upon to further reduce complexity, enhance coverage and improve power consumption of MTC UEs.
One complexity and cost reduction technique is to reduce the radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth of LC-MTC UEs to 1.4 MHz (operating with 6 Physical Resource Blocks (PRBs), where a PRB is a unit of resource allocation in the frequency domain).
For a coverage enhancement (CE) aspect of this WI, one technique for reducing complexity and cost is repetition of the physical channel. However, it is expected that the number of repetitions will be relatively high (e.g., hundreds of repetitions), which may impact spectra efficiency.